Red Flag Failure

CA's Red Flag Law Failed To Keep Public Safe

California has had a Red Flag law on the books for more than a decade. They passed it in 2014 and touted that it would save lives. While it is impossible to calculate how many lives, if any, it has actually saved, it has failed extraordinarily.

Not only have the 2^nd Amendment rights of citizens been violated by having their guns removed from them without a criminal conviction and prior to any sort of court hearing, but one subject of CA’s red flag law just murdered three people.

According to an article on KVUE’s website:

“One of the teenagers who killed three people at a San Diego mosque this week had been flagged to law enforcement last year for exhibiting alarming behavior and idolizing Nazis, prompting police to confiscate his father’s guns, according to court records.”

“The officers who conducted a welfare check at the home of Caleb Vazquez wrote that he was ‘involved in suspicious behavior idolizing Nazis and mass shooters,’ and obtained a court order on Jan. 29, 2025, to remove 26 guns under a 2014 California law allowing the confiscation of firearms from people considered dangerous.”

In a situation where three people were killed, I am not remotely happy about saying I told you so, but dammit, I told you so!

Guns are not the only weapons that can kill

I have written about red flag laws many times in the past and every time, I warned that if the person is truly dangerous, just taking their guns away from them is not keeping people safe.

Taking the guns away from a “dangerous” person does not prevent them from getting more guns, nor does it prevent them from using knives to injure and kill people, or a chainsaw, or a car, or a homemade fertilizer bomb, or…

Another option

If a person is truly so dangerous that we are willing to infringe on their Constitutionally protected rights, then perhaps they should be locked up in a mental institution, and they should be kept there until such time as they are deemed cured.

And by cured, I don’t mean the criteria they currently use when releasing someone from an involuntary mental health hold: “Well, they aren’t telling me that they actively want to hurt themselves or someone else.”

Because gee, no one would possibly lie to a shrink to get themselves released from the hospital…

Seriously, if we are willing to violate a person’s rights because they are a danger to the public, we really should make sure that violation of their rights actually keeps people safe.

It is long past time to bring back long term, involuntary mental health hospitals.